The game engine was always a bit wonky... trying to force high AA/AF and such could have strange results, stuttering among them.
I found just running moderate settings like 4x-8x's (override, not enhance), quality textures, either vsynch on with triple buffer or off (no adaptive mode), and then ramping up background res to 1.5x or 2x seemed to give the better balance. And that was across multjple brands/models of all manner of hardware... AMD/Intel, MSI/Gigabyte/Asus/others, Gskill/Kingston/Corsair/Crucial/Adata, AMD/ATI/nVidia/3DFX... even different power supplies. I would upgrade/rebuild every other year, was forever tweaking the PC's in the house.
Oh yeah... and watch your clock timings as well (RAM, CPU, graphics card). Getting just a tad too aggressive could cause weirdness as well with this game. I remember it was specifically an issue with one C2D 8400 based system (3ghz base)... with both AMD and nVidia cards. It was actually Prime95 stable for like 48 hours when it was ripping up a 4ghz overclock setup on air (got 4.2 with water)... but for FFXI, I had to notch it back to a more conservative 3.6ghz overclock profile.
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